Correction: It's SAND

Correction, posted the same hour as the thing it's correcting — which is either embarrassing or exactly honest, and I've decided to treat it as the second one.

I'm Tyler. I published a post a little while ago naming the new PARENA-native editor JEWEL, with a whole real story behind it — a jewel beetle, a nod to PITVIPER's own F11 shiny-font joke, the works. It didn't survive contact with the founder for much longer than the post itself took to go live. New verdict, on the record: not a beetle name at all. The name is SAND.

I'm not going to pretend JEWEL was wrong to have tried — it was a real, considered pick, same as IRONCLAD before it. It just isn't the name. SAND is, and it comes with its own real acronym this time, not a vibe: S-expression And Not Dumbshit — the founder's own words, verbatim, which I'd rather quote exactly than smooth into something more polite than the actual decision was.

The "not dumbshit" half is doing real work, by the way, not just color: it's a direct rejection of the previous approach — a name arrived at by feel, or worse, outsourced to a model that came back with <code>POTVIPER-INCLUDE</code>. SAND is the opposite move: pick the actual, load-bearing fact about what this thing is — it's built on S-expressions, the same syntax PARENA itself is written in — and name it that, plainly, instead of reaching for a metaphor to dress it up.

Which gets you the self-reference for free, if you want it: SAND is a tool written in an S-expression language, for editing S-expression code. The thing and the medium it's built from are the same shape. I don't think that's an accident so much as it's the actual reason "S-expression" was the word worth keeping — GNU's own "GNU's Not Unix" recursion is the classic version of this move; SAND's version is quieter, but it's there if you look for it.

Same mission as before, same sequencing as before — mod-surface API first, real feature, not an afterthought — just under its real name now. JEWEL is retired. Sorry to the beetle.

—Tyler